The evolution of computers and networking technologies from high-cost, low performance data processing systems to low cost, high-performance communication, problem solving, and entertainment systems has provided a cost-effective and time saving means to lessen the burden of performing every day tasks such as correspondence, bill paying, shopping, budgeting information and gathering, etc. For example, a computing system interfaced to the Internet, by way of wire or wireless technology, can provide a user with a channel for nearly instantaneous access to a wealth of information from a repository of web sites and servers located around the world. Such a system, as well, allows a user to not only gather information, but also to provide information to disparate sources. As such, online data storing and management has become increasingly popular.
In light of such data storing, hierarchical languages for storing data have been developed to facilitate intuitively organizing the data as compared to relational data stores, for example. While relational data stores are typically high performance, hierarchical files, such as extensible markup language (XML) files, can become more difficult to handle. One reason is that XML files are typically loaded entirely into memory before querying can occur. Once in memory, however, querying can be as fast as the processor of the system can handle. Due to this, the cost of loading the XML file in memory (such as on startup) is outweighed by the structure of the data and easily operability in programming languages, for example. However, where applications allow modification of an XML or other hierarchical file, reloading and parsing the entire file in memory again is time-consuming, especially for frequent modification.
Moreover, large XML or other hierarchical files can become fragile as they grow such that direct edits to the file can result in breaking the file. For example, the file can comprise many tokens indicating hierarchical structure—the tokens can correspond to open and close (or start and end) tags. Neglecting to include a tag, or deleting such a tag without replacing it, can occur often; however, these operations typically “break” the file, such that parser will not/cannot completely parse the broken file until the file is restored to a proper structure. This can hinder development especially where the errors and/or forgotten tags are minor in nature.